


This Side Up (Handle with Care)

by MissNessarose



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: (But mostly hurt), 5 Things, Angst, Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally Repressed, Gen, Introspection, Most other Avengers are mentioned in passing, Survivor Guilt, guilt complex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 14:39:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9276398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissNessarose/pseuds/MissNessarose
Summary: Wanda has too many tears and a fragile heart.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Cranked this out as the result of a 2AM emotional feelings binge - this piece is more self-introspection on my part because this year's been pretty rough, and I needed a character to cry just as easily as I do. I always keep an eye out for a good sad, so I figured I would post this up for others who do the same.  
> (I love my beautiful magic beeb, I swear)

i

Their mother is a nurse. Maybe that's where Wanda gets it from - her deeply rooted need to take care of everyone else. In the process, she often ignores herself. He has always admired that about her, has always envied her selflessness.

 _Mamă_ takes Wanda with her when she can, when her work days are slow and she's able to mind her daughter while she sees to her regular patients. His sister is still young; there is little that she can do to really _help,_ but she tries.

Pietro comes home one night to find their bedroom littered with paper scraps and spare envelopes- his sister is perched in the middle of it all, scribbling furiously across a square of carefully cut cardstock.

“What are you _doing?”_

She meets his eyes with a look that knows she's been caught, and glances between him and the pile of matching cards at her feet.

“It's for _mamă’s_ patients. For the holidays. Many of them have no family to visit them, so I thought I would make something nice.”

She speaks as if it were simple, as if her act of kindness were as commonplace as breathing.

“You're something else, Wanda,” he teases. When he finds her asleep on their floor later, still vigilant beside her pile of completed cards, he tucks a blanket around her shoulders and cannot help but smile.

“They'll love them, sister.”

With basket in hand, Wanda commandeers her brother to deliver the cards - Pietro only agrees just to see her smile in tandem to the overjoyed recipients.

It's something small, but she wants to help them.

Weeks later, someone sends her a small plush sheep and a lengthy card in return. Her smile dissolves into a sob upon reading their kind words, and he has never been more proud of her.

His sister has a fragile heart, bigger than herself.

 

ii

“If we do this, we can help everyone else.”

When Wanda says it, he believes her with all of his heart - when the man at the rally told them so yesterday, he didn't sound nearly as sincere. Pietro wants his sister to be happy, but at what cost?

“I do not trust him, I'm sorry. If the things I have heard in the alleys are true, then what they're looking for is lab rats, Wanda, not starry-eyed volunteers. They want to see this place fall just as much as the rest of the people in control.”

She does that thing where her lips press tight together and the bridge of her nose crinkles, the face where she knows he's right but is too stubborn to say so. He loves her, but Wanda can be quite a romantic idealist, pretending that the rest of their world isn't falling apart around them. It's how she copes. It's how she keeps her glass heart all in one piece.

“If it is the only chance they will give us, I will take it over starving in the streets,” she finally says, still clinging to her false hope. “But I will not go without you. If you want to stay...then I stay, too.”

To tell her no is to live with the weight of this decision, to know that he's let her down, even though she won't say a word about it once it's over. However, to agree to the man's offer is to sign away their lives to a cause unknown, to hope and pray that it may do their country some good in the end.

“If you believe that it will help, then I go with you.”

If Wanda has hope, then maybe - just maybe - he can cling to it as well.

Their cause is lost when their cells are changing, rapid-fire inside of them, their blood screaming and his pulse singing a brisk staccato beat against his skin. His sister screams at the voices in her head, at the things she doesn't understand.

They can feel each other so much more acutely than before, their bond strengthened by the magic coursing through their bodies.

Even through the concrete and thick glass, he can hear Wanda wailing a siren’s song, her sobs stifled by the empty chambers around her.

She has helped no one - she has only hurt herself, and she has hurt her brother.

His sister has a fragile heart, and the world has started to chip away at the glass, fragment by fragment.

 

iii

HYDRA teaches them. It changes their functions, their processes, so effectively that's it's hard to remember the _before_ to this ruined _after._

_You are unique, but you are expendable._

_You are replaceable._

_You are nothing._

_You are worth nothing, and will therefore comply with instructions as directed._

_Nothing_ becomes a part of Wanda’s mantra; she does not remember a time when she allowed herself luxury, when she believed that she deserved anything.

She is the one, especially, who made this mistake, and brought them here in the guest place. Her brother is a saint, a martyr. She is the one at fault.

Her heart is held together with fleeting hope and cracked bonds - some of the guards call her crybaby when they slip her food through the slat against the floor.

She doesn't fault them.

After years, you begin to wonder who is really at fault anymore.

When they blame her for things she didn't even do, things she couldn't have even done, she believes them - she is the reason that they are here, so she cannot possibly be right. They are _scientists,_ educated and intelligent. She blames her powers, blames her weakness...but most of all, she blames herself.

 _Nothing, nothing, nothing,_ the voices taunt, as she slides swirling red mist between her hands. She presses her palms together until the power between them leaves burns.

It's all her fault.

All of it.

She does not cry often, but she cries easily. It doesn't do her any good, anymore, but her hiccuped sobs still ring in tandem in her brother's body and her own. His thoughts toy at the edge of her subconscious, concerned and full of worry.

She locks him out.

She is nothing.

It's all her fault.

His sister has a fragile heart, one that has fallen apart a long, long time ago.

 

iv

He dies, and it's all that she can think about for the longest time.

_“These things happen. They don't get any easier.”_

_“He saved my life, Wanda. Your brother's a hero.”_

_“There's nothing that you could have done, kid.”_

Yet, she wonders if there was. If he hadn't done this - if she had told him to stay - if she had done something differently - moved there - said this -

None of it change the fact that he's gone, that she is now the lingering half of what had previously been a whole.

If she hasn't suggested any of this in the first place, they wouldn't have these powers. Pietro wouldn't have died. She wouldn't be on her own among the Avengers with little clue as to what the next step was, where to go, how to move on from here.

 _It's your decision,_ they say, when they ask her to stay. So why does she feel like she has no choice? Nothing will be the same without him. Nothing matters.

She can see it in their eyes, how they look at her, that they're trying their best to help - but they can't bring him back. No one can.

They have suffered in similar ways, but it is so, so different.

They think she is stern and strong - she will not let them see her weakness. Only in the darkness of her assigned room does she curl up and crumple, and cry until she is tired and sore and just as upset as when she started.

Her glass heart has fallen apart at the cracks, spiderwebs spreading as she tries desperately to put it back together in any way she can. She loves too much for her own good, wishes it were her instead of him, because her brother was good and kind and wonderful and a _hero._

And she is a failure.

She has a fragile heart, one splintered in her hands and patched up roughly with what self she has left.

 

v

 _Bad_ goes to _worse_ in the blink of an eye, and overnight she goes from reluctant hero to _monster, murderer, fuck-up,_ **_failure._ **

They say that they can correct it. She smiles and tells the Captain that she doesn't mind, that he's doing his best.

She genuinely doesn't believe that she deserves a second chance.

She has lost her home, her family, her brother...it is only sensible that, somewhere along the line, she loses herself as well.

Sharp-minded radicals talk on the television and wax poetic about potential trials, of seeing her executed.

Wanda hears it so often that she begins to believe that they're right.

The week goes by in a messy, tangled blur, passing in conferences and confrontations, battles and betrayal and all kinds of deception. She is lied to, locked up, abandoned, and - at least in her own eyes and among the voices occupying her mind - left for dead. The fantasy she's entertained of this wonderful, caring team flies out the window the second they're gone, the second she realizes that _staying in for the weekend_ means _house arrest_ , that the suggestion is not one at all, and instead an order she cannot disobey.

A tiny spark sits inside her glass heart, cold and withered, the last remains of a girl who believed in the world. It's all that's left, and she lost belief in love a long time ago.

When she believes for a moment that they are whole and that they will win, she finds herself locked up just as - if not more - securely in an undersea prison, caged and shock-collared like a wild animal.

They are scared.

And oh, they should be.

Her sobs ring in the narrow cell block, and she doesn't care at all who hears.

Wanda Maximoff had a fragile heart. The glass shattered long ago. What's left has built itself back together from nothing, and become hard to try to protect itself from the world. She cries easily and loves too much - and she is a fool.

For she learns nothing at all, and lets her glass heart be broken, again and again and again.


End file.
